Hacker News Reader

Comment by caymanjim | Hacker News Reader

This is an interesting pop-science read, but who is Trevor Klee? As far as I can tell, he's a college exam tutor who's written a few "how to pass the GRE" booklets. He's writing about trying to start a biomedical business around this idea, but if his LinkedIn is accurate, he's never had a job beyond tutoring college students. His list of "failed projects," linked to from the blog, contains a bunch of similar biomed business ideas, none of which have anything at all to do with each other on a technical level ("Using RNAi for agriculture", "Exploring ketamine for blood pressure").

This basically reads as "I got a masters in molecular bio, have never worked in the field, and want you to give me money for my next crackpot idea". That doesn't mean the idea is wrong, but this guy isn't the one who's gonna make it happen.

View on HN

This is quite the display of unnecessary credentialism. It’s a blog. A nicely-designed and seemingly useful one at that (I’m finding this post on IBS to be a handy summary and pointer to studies: https://trevorklee.com/a-complete-guide-to-self-diagnosing-a...).

From what I can tell, this is a humble, curious, and well-meaning guy that funds his menagerie of research interests with a successful tutoring business (a noble career in and of itself). I see absolutely no need to frame him as an unworthy crank.

I don't think the parent was taking much issue with the blog posts or the fact that he's a tutor. I think it's his previous companies, plus this paragraph from the post:

> So, first of all, the confession: I’m not a neutral observer here. In talking about this paper, I’m talking my own book. My company, Highway Pharmaceuticals, is currently raising funds to get a safer, easier to use, extended-release version of cyclosporine, the most common calcineurin inhibitor, into first-in-human trials. If this paper is correct, investors should probably consider throwing money at me.

Yes, this. I enjoyed the blog post. It was an easy read, the idea is intriguing, it linked to a related paper. I found the plug for the company mildly offputting, and decided to see if the author was someone actively working in this space.

I don't think anyone needs credentials to have an interesting idea, but it's laughable that someone with no lab or research or business experience is an actual player in this space. I guess people can invest in him if they want. The idea that he's fundraising for human trials is laughable.

As they say, ideas are easy. Execution is hard.

I don’t know much about how the biotech industry works, but are you saying that he should “work in the field” before pitching this idea? In software that would be almost laughed at as a suggestion, if the idea is indeed promising.

No, in software terms, he's saying that is somebody comes and tells you "Software that has enough spaces, never crashes", and he "happens" to be selling the "Extra-spaces-adder" IDE, then maybe don't believe him...

And how many times have you been faced with "I have this great idea, I just need a few programmers to build it"?

>In software that would be almost laughed at as a suggestion

yes because we don't care if our software breaks every five minutes and if its clobbered together by people who have no idea what they're doing because 99% of the time it's just consumer gadgets anyway. If you deal with technologies that affect people's health that's not really how things work, or in any other serious engineering discipline.

If the semiconductor or aeronautics industry would work like the software industry your computer wouldn't boot up and the planes would double their fuel consumption every year

>yes because we don't care if our software breaks every five minutes and if its clobbered together by people who have no idea what they're doing because 99% of the time it's just consumer gadgets anyway. If you deal with technologies that affect people's health that's not really how things work, or in any other serious engineering discipline.

Yeah, you're not really gonna get away with an "oopsie woopsie!! we made a widdle fucky wucky! our elves are working vewy hard to fix this!" after you kill a few people due to negligence.

I wouldn't put it quite like that, but....

It would be hard to overstate how complicated the nervous and immune systems are. On top of the biology, the provision of medical care is also absurdly complex: there are all sorts of biases in how patients are treated, some of which turn into feedback loops. An early heart transplant might stave off vascular dementia, while a patient with severe dementia might not be eligible for transplants at all.

It is certainly possible for a new person to notice something that people already working in the field have missed. At the same time, domain knowledge is worth a lot, especially when trying to figure out if a relationship seen in messy, observational data is real. I'd be skeptical either way, but collaborating with a more established team would help a little bit.

I don't think that software, in general, has quite so many foot-guns laying around. However, people do give similar advice for cryptography and (sometimes) machine learning because those fields do offer a number of subtle ways to really foul things up.

Anybody asking me for money to cure Alzheimer’s I just at this point assume is Theranos 2.0. There are plenty of well informed life sciences investors with very deep pockets.

Yeah I’d be as likely to buy a magical anti-dementia rock as invest in this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com